The most disturbing thing about the mural was its complete lack of a fixed focal point. Had it been purely abstract, or based on some kind of regular pattern, that would have been understandable, but there were plenty of interesting details. It was just that no matter which one Bert chose to focus on, another in the corner of his eye would immediately demand his attention…and no sooner would he shift his gaze there, than another seemed more important. Eventually he decided it would be less headache-inducing to have photos made of each section so he could examine them in turn; at first he had simply pulled out the Polaroid he kept in the glove box, but the results weren’t good enough so he had driven back to the nearest gas station to make a phone call.
“Collect from upstate? This had better be good, Bert.”
“Maybe, but probably not. This is more of a ‘prevailing on decades of friendship’ thing.”
Larry sighed. “OK, what?”
“Could you send one of your photographers out here to the Quincy farm to take some pictures of a mural?”
“I’m guessing you mean Richard Quincy, the reclusive painter who died a couple of years ago? His place was up near Cliffordsville, wasn’t it?”
“Holst. About 20 miles farther out.”
“And shitty roads the whole way. You’re gonna owe me one.”
“Hey, I’m not asking you to make the drive yourself. Expense it out; you can probably get a Sunday color feature out of it. ‘The Secret Legacy of an Eccentric Genius’, that kind of thing.”
“OK, sold. You missed your calling, buddy. There’s no way I can get anybody up there today, though; can you stay in the area overnight?”
“Sure; I’m looking at a sign that says ‘ACANCY’ right across the highway.”
“So, should I just send my guy to the Bates Motel?”
“It’s the Starlight, smartass. Just past mile marker 72 after he comes through Holst.”
“All right, he’ll probably be there noonish. I’ll tell him to look for you in the diner. It does have a diner, doesn’t it?”
“Next door. That’ll work.”
After hanging up, Bert realized that he had skipped lunch; the meat loaf special was better than he expected, and though Chloe (assuming the embroidered name on her blouse was correct) wasn’t much to look at, she was quite the font of local knowledge.
“So you’re a writer, huh? I guess you’re doin’ a book on the late Mr. Quincy?”
“I might be. How’d you guess?”
“Cause there ain’t nothin’ else worth writin’ about for a hundred miles in any direction.”
He laughed. “You’re a smart cookie, Chloe.”
“Not smart enough to get outta here. Folks ’round here couldn’t figure out why Mr. Quincy settled here. I mean, I guess a painter likes quiet, but there are much prettier places not all that far away. He coulda had a nice place up on the lake for what he musta paid for that farm o’his.”
“He wasn’t from here?”
“Nah, I heard tell he was from one of the Carolinas. He was already famous when he moved here. He coulda gone someplace where there was somethin’ worth painting.”
“Well, he wasn’t a landscape painter, so that probably didn’t matter much to him.”
“Oh, that’s right, he painted that weird modern stuff.”
“Well, only after about ’66. Before that it was mostly realistic fantasy art; science fiction book covers, movie concept art, that sort of thing.”
“That’s about the time he moved here. I remember ’cause it was just after I divorced my first husband. You think maybe the same thing made him change his style and run away from the city? Like a heartbreak or somethin’?”
“You know, Chloe, that’s not a bad theory. It looks like I’ll have to hit the morgue when I get back to town, to see what I can dig up on old Quincy.” In response to her confused and slightly horrified expression, he added, “I mean the newspaper archives. ‘The Morgue’ is what newspaper people call the library of back issues, old clippings and photos, stuff like that. Before I went freelance I used to be a reporter, and my best friend is an editor. In fact, he’s sending a photographer to meet me here tomorrow morning.”
“Ah. Well, I guess I’ll see you for breakfast; there ain’t no other place to get a decent cup of coffee this side of Holst.”
After wishing his chatty hostess a good afternoon, he had another cigarette and walked over to book a room at the motel, then after examining the Polaroids he decided to drive back out to the Quincy place; there were still several hours before sunset, and maybe the mural would be less upsetting in the summer-evening light.
It was worse.
The windows in the mural room faced west and south, and the reddish hue of the sunlight accentuated the predominant crimson, amber and bronze hues of the painting, making it look almost as though it were on fire. He saw many more faces than he had on the first visit, and the feathers of the multiplicity of wings seemed to rustle and shimmer; he also saw hands where he hadn’t before, peeking out from the wings and juxtaposed with legs and horns and teeth. In this light the eyes – hundreds of them of every shape and size, peering or glaring or watching from every part of the mural – seemed to all be looking back at him, glinting in various colors like gemstones. But of all the odd features of the design, the most horrifying were the wheels. Every other recognizable part of the painting was part of some living creature or another, whether bird or beast or human, but except for the eyes all around their rims, the wheels were most definitely not. And while the way in which the various biological features related to each other made little anatomical sense, the way the wheels were depicted made no sense at all. They were like things from an Escher woodcut, objects which could not have existed in three-dimensional reality, with spokes and rims that turned at crazy angles to one another and sometimes seemed to project outward from the wall. Their perspective was maddening; from some angles they seemed close to the living figures, while from others they seemed far away, and when viewed obliquely they were both at the same time. And somehow, at least in this hazy light shining through dingy windowpanes across dusty air, the ones in his peripheral vision seemed to be turning on themselves, rotating out of the plane of the design entirely.
A few minutes in that room was more than enough, and though he was a sophisticated and urbane man Bert decided to head back to the motel and to stay away from this room until he had both human company and the psychological comfort of full morning sun. He locked the door and returned the key to its hiding place in the woodshed as the caretaker had instructed, then drove back to the motel at a rather higher rate of speed than was strictly prudent on a rutty backroad in a pine barrens. He then proceeded to drink most of a bottle of cheap bourbon over the next few hours while not really paying attention to the television, and fell into a fitful sleep haunted by nightmares of huge wheels covered in eyes, slowly rotating toward him.
***********************************************************************************
“This is incredible, Mr. Foley! Thank you so much for inviting me out here!” The young photographer had finally finished setting up his lights, and was really taking stock of the mural for the first time.
“You’re welcome, Emil, but you really need to thank Mr. Gershwin. I just asked for a photographer; he was the one who chose you.”
“I guess he knows I’m a Quincy fan. Half the books in my apartment have cover art by him.” He reached into his backpack and pulled out an old Ballantine paperback whose cover was graced by what looked like an evil wizard being confronted by a gorgeous angel, his face averted from the blinding radiance emitted by her voluptuous and scantily-clad body. “I like all the great fantasy artists…Frazetta, Vallejo, Krenkel, all of ’em. But Quincy’s stuff is just the best. I even like his late stuff, when he started doing mostly horror art.”
“Quite a difference between this and that,” Bert said, gesturing toward the mural with the paperback.
“Well, they aren’t that different technically; it’s mostly style and subject matter.” Emil looked again at the wall, and added, “but you’re definitely right about those being different.” Then a pause and, “Well, let’s get these pictures taken so we can get back to town before dark.”
“I second that motion. Is there anything I can do to help out?”
***********************************************************************************
“So the guy’s girlfriend dumped him and he went nuts. So? I’m running a newspaper here, Bert, not a Gothic romance publisher.”
“You’ve gotta admit it’s pretty weird.”
“Hell yeah it’s weird; you could market that shit as an alternative to No-Doz.”
“I mean the circumstances, not the art.”
“How so? Artists are always a bit screwy; he just cracked the rest of the way.”
Bert spread a number of paperbacks he had borrowed from Emil on the desk. “Look, here are examples of his work prior to October of ’66, going all the way back to the forties. Clearly the work of the same man, yet all kinds of different subjects. And here…” – he opened a large coffee-table book – “…are plenty of examples of his concept art. One reason Quincy was so highly regarded was his incredible degree of perception; he could read an author’s description of some fantastic thing and paint it as though he were copying it straight out of their mind.”
“And?”
The books on the desk were shoved to one side and replaced by three paperbacks, several photos of movie posters and the shots of the mural. “These books are from the late ’60s, the movie posters from a few years later. Notice how similar they all are, as though he just couldn’t get these images out of his head. His work all but dried up after the horror craze of the early ’70s ended; he just couldn’t paint anything else any more.”
Larry quietly perused the pictures again. “He wasn’t that old when he died, was he?”
“58. The doc who signed the death certificate called it a stroke.”
“Not surprised. Family?”
“Not immediate. He was an only child and both parents were dead. His only named heir other than the foundation he started was a cousin in Charleston; I talked to her yesterday and she hadn’t seen Quincy since she was a kid in the early ’50s. The foundation gives an annual cash prize for best fantasy art; it owns the house but can’t do much with it because it’s too far off the interstate to be a tourist attraction.”
“And the girlfriend?”
Bert pulled a couple of photocopies of old newspaper pictures out of a folder. “They were quite the popular couple for a few years.”
Larry whistled. “What a stunner! I can see why he took losing her so hard. But where is she now? Wait, don’t tell me: nobody knows.”
“How’d you guess?”
“Give me some credit, Bert.”
“She seems to have fallen off the face of the Earth in October of ’66, the same time as Quincy had his breakdown. I tried tracing her history to see if I could find some leads that way, but there’s no record of her before ’57. Really, that’s not so mysterious, considering we don’t even know her real name.” In response to a raised eyebrow, Bert explained, “She was called Sophie, but that appears to have been a stage name. Her lease was in Quincy’s name, so that’s no help, and before she took up with him in ’62 she was apparently, um, ‘kept’ by a Hollywood film director. Quincy met her while he was out there doing some sketches for a sci-fi movie.”
“Go on, drop the other shoe.”
“Dan Prosser”.
“Hoooooooly shit.”
“Yeah.”
“So when are you flying out to LA?”
“First flight tomorrow. God bless deregulation.”
“And coming back?”
“Thursday afternoon.”
“Then straight here from the airport, OK?”
“You know it.”
***********************************************************************************
“Thank you so much for agreeing to see me on such short notice, Mrs. Prosser.”
“Felicia.”
Prosser had definitely had an eye for beauty; it was difficult to believe the woman sitting across from him on the patio had already seen her sixtieth birthday, but then, Prosser had left her a considerable fortune and a continuing income from residuals on his films, and the growing home video market promised to increase that even more. She could afford to keep looking young, despite her own career fizzling out in the mid-’50s.
“Felicia. It’s quite difficult to find details on Richard Quincy, so when I discovered that he’d done some work for your late husband…”
“And stolen his mistress.”
“Well, um…I wasn’t…I mean…”
She laughed, warmly and genuinely. “Please, Mr. Foley…”
“Bert.”
“This is Hollywood, Bert. I was only 28 when I met Dan, and he was a highly successful director of 50. I had no illusions, and one of the reasons we stayed happily married for so long was that I not only tolerated his affairs; I facilitated them. Drove the gossip columnists nuts. But Dan had what he wanted, and I had what I wanted.” She gestured expansively, taking in the beautiful house, pool and garden. “And I still do. Mimosa?”
He almost refused, reflexively, but then: “Don’t mind if I do,” and took the glass from the tray a very attractive young woman had just delivered. He tried not to stare, but apparently failed.
“It’s OK, honey; that’s part of the reason I keep her around. Oh, you’re blushing! But surely you knew that I was like that? Even back before it was socially acceptable, my preferences were hardly a secret.”
Of course she was right; practically from the moment she had arrived in Hollywood in 1944, Felicia Crane had been almost as well-known for her omnivorous sexual tastes as for her beauty. “I’m sorry,” he laughed. “I’m afraid I’m just not quite used to that level of candor!”
“Get used to it, darling, it’ll be the norm within another ten years. Mark my words, you’ll be seeing a lot more celebrities coming out of the closet. It’ll be all the rage in the nineties.”
“I’m sure you’re right, but I certainly didn’t mean to bring up such a personal subject.”
“You didn’t; I did. But it’s germane to what you came here to discuss, anyhow, considering that Dominique was my girlfriend before she was Dan’s.”
“Dominique? You mean Sophie?”
“Actually, it was supposed to be ‘Sophia’. Good grief, ‘Sophie’. I’ll never know why she let people shorten it. ‘Sophia’ is much more sophisticated.”
“So is ‘Dominique’.”
“Too many people knew her by that name; it was time for a change. And it was much easier to change in those days, you know, before they started putting everything on computers.”
“So you knew her before 1957?”
“But of course, love; that was when she moved in, but I had known her since soon after I married Dan.”
“How did you meet?”
“You could say I discovered her. She was working as an artist’s model and was trying out for some bit part at the studio. Have you ever seen any good pictures of her?”
“Not really, though judging by the pictures I have seen she was beautiful.”
“She was magnificent; pictures never did her justice. But would you like to see more?”
“Certainly, if you don’t mind!”
“If I minded, I wouldn’t have volunteered. Come on.” She took him by the hand and pulled him inside, then into a library. Finding the book she wanted was the work of minutes, and then it was open in his lap. There were dozens of photos of Dominique/Sophia, in various states of undress. Against a white backdrop. By the pool out back. At the Brown Derby. Cuddling nude with Felicia. Posing at a party with Cary Grant. “Breathtaking, isn’t she?”
“That’s an understatement. Why didn’t she get into movies? Did she lack the talent?”
She shrugged. “Not so much talent as ambition. But there was also something else.” The air in the room had suddenly changed, and Bert felt a distinct chill that he didn’t think was due to the air conditioning. “Haven’t you wondered why she left Hollywood and headed East with Rick?”
“Well, no offence, but I had assumed that perhaps your husband had tired of her, and Quincy came along at the right time.”
“Look at that woman, Bert. Can you imagine anyone tiring of her? Quite the opposite; she left because Dan had become so obsessed with her that it was destroying him. She was like an addiction. So she and I decided together that she should go, because despite my initial pragmatic reasons for marrying him, I had grown to love him. And Dominique loved us both. So we chose a new name for her: Sophia, which means ‘wisdom’. To remind her of why. But it was much too late; Dan replaced one addiction with another, but wasn’t patient enough to drink himself to death. So he shot himself instead, and the only reason it wasn’t front-page news was that he got upstaged by Jack Kennedy.” She raised her glass, and said “Here’s to colossally bad timing and ridiculous coincidences.”
“I’m sorry.” It was a weak line, but Bert couldn’t think of a better one. Then after a long pause, “It says a great deal about your character that you don’t hate her.”
“Oh, I did, at first.” She walked over to the shelf and handed a framed photo to Bert. “But how could you hate that for long? She can’t help what she is, and she did her best to save him. Just like she tried to save poor Rick.”
Bert stared at the strikingly beautiful face in the picture, and realized that he had seen those eyes before. Oh, Quincy had tried to disguise them, even to the point of distorting their shape and changing their color, but the model was obvious. He had seen them staring at him from the walls of that dusty farmhouse, peering into his soul from the covers of horror novels, haunting his nightmares of the past few weeks. He finally tore his gaze from them to read the inscription: “To F & D with all my love, Monique.” And in the stillness he heard an awful sound, faint but distinct, like the grinding of unearthly wheels; it stopped abruptly when Felicia took the picture from him.
“There’s one other thing I need to show you. Nobody has seen this in years, but if you’re going to keep following this road you ought to.” Bert did not move; she gently took his hand again and brought him into the next room, which had clearly been her late husband’s office. She suggested he sit in a sofa near the window, then unlocked a heavy cabinet near the desk and drew out a large sketchbook. “Dan wasn’t much of an artist, but he was good enough to do storyboards for his movies. This was for a project he wanted to do, but the special effects in 1962 were insufficient for his vision.” She handed him the book, whose cover simply said “project“, then went over to the bar and poured a drink, which she put on the end table beside him as he started to open the book. “You’re gonna need this.”
As he examined the pages, Bert’s flesh started to crawl so badly he wanted to hurl the thing from him. “Dan Prosser did these?” he finally stammered, looking across to where Felicia was sitting, her own glass – filled with something much stronger than a mimosa, if it was the same as his – already half empty. She nodded. He looked back down to the book, whose pages were covered with what looked like a rough draft of the mural in Quincy’s house. Faces were juxtaposed with wings, legs, hands, and other details, wildly mixed and matched. Eyes decorated every leaf, sometimes in rows and sometimes peeking out from other features and sometimes placed haphazardly. And though Prosser’s artistic skill was nothing like Quincy’s, the inspiration for the crudely-drawn wheels…covered with eyes and often drawn over the other sketches…was clearly the same. The relentless wheels, turning and grinding on every last page.
Somehow, they eventually made it out of that office and into the foyer, where Bert finally managed to break the silence. “Please don’t take this the wrong way, but…why weren’t you affected as they were? You loved her too.”
“Years of therapy. And I never had the artistic vision of a Dan Prosser or a Rick Quincy.”
***********************************************************************************
“Did you find anything else about the girl?”
“The only artist she worked for whose name Mrs. Prosser could remember died in ’78. And if she knew anything else herself, she didn’t tell me.” Then in response to muttered obscenities, he added, “I only had a few days, Larry. And I thought in light of the sketches…”
“What?”
He hesitated for a few moments, then a long sigh. “I don’t know.”
“Well, while you were out exploring Hollywood Babylon, I did a little digging myself. Did you know that beside the annual prize, the Quincy Foundation pays out a monthly sum to an account at a small bank in Memphis? And that just a few months ago, a collector who preferred to remain anonymous sold four original Quincy paintings, previously known only from photos, by auction in Manhattan?”
“I knew about the paintings; that’s what got me interested in Quincy. You think it’s Sophie?”
“Who else? From what I’ve been able to dig up, Quincy’s friends were pretty surprised when they broke up; nobody suspected any trouble.”
“That fits what Mrs. Prosser told me.”
“Yep. Apparently he left her pretty well taken care of. And then there’s this.” He went to his bookshelves and pulled out a large book that had been lying down on the bottom shelf; there was a business card serving as a bookmark. “Take a look.”
Bert opened the book to the marked page, revealing a reproduction of what appeared to be an engraving or woodcut from the 16th or 17th century; it featured weird winged creatures with multiple faces, each flanked by wheels which contained other wheels at right angles, the rims embedded with eyes. He could not suppress a chill. “What the hell…”
“I guess you Gentiles get the Cliff’s Notes version of the Old Testament. It’s from the first chapter of the Book of Ezekiel, in which the prophet had a vision of cherubim before the throne of God. The term was later misapplied to those weird little winged children you see in Renaissance paintings, but that, my friend,” he said, stabbing his finger at the monsters in the illustration, “is the real deal. Like so many creatures from myth and legend, angels got sanitized later, but originally they were supposed to be terrifying. Do you remember what angels in scripture always say first thing when they appear to people? ‘Be not afraid.’ Because just the sight of one was supposed to make you piss yourself.”
“Like in Raiders of the Lost Ark.”
“I never got to see it.”
“Oh, the climax of the movie involves angels of death who kill everyone who looks at them.”
“Yeah, well I guess Spielberg paid attention in Hebrew school.”
“So, you think both Prosser and Quincy were inspired by Ezekiel?”
“Maybe. Or maybe they were all inspired by the same thing. Look, Bert, I’m a newspaperman, not a mystic; if there’s a story here it’s one better suited to Weekly World News than a respectable paper. But if you can write me something that my publisher won’t fire me for printing, I think I can pay you enough to cover your expenses.”
“Thanks, old friend. And thanks for not mocking me too much.”
“What, me mock? Perish the thought.”
When Bert got home, he tossed his suit jacket across the back of the sofa and pulled a beer out of the fridge before checking his answering machine. After the usual assortment of messages one would expect after being out of town for a few days, a silky voice he did not recognize came from the speaker: “Mr. Foley, my dear friend Felicia Prosser tells me that you might like to hear from me. As it turns out, I’ll be arriving in town on Monday to handle some business, and I’ll be staying at the Downtown Hilton. I’d be happy to meet with you that evening, and to try to answer some of your questions if I can. Just meet me in the hotel bar at 7 if you’re interested.” He slammed his finger down hard on the “stop” button; the sound of the wheels turning in the tape cassette had become almost deafening.
***********************************************************************************
It was hard to believe that the photos he had seen in Hollywood had all been taken between twenty-one and twenty-six years ago; the woman sitting across from him at the table seemed to have barely aged at all, though for the dates to work out she had to have been over fifty. Felicia had said pictures never did her justice; that was an understatement. Bert had never been face-to-face with a goddess before, but either she didn’t notice his stupefaction or she was too polite to mention it. Or maybe she was so used to this kind of reaction she thought it was normal. He somehow stumbled through all the introductory small talk without making too much of a fool of himself (he hoped) or staring too openly (he hoped), and eventually he realized she was asking him a question: “What was it that got you interested in writing about Richard? Were you a fan of his?”
“Not really, though of course I had a passing familiarity with his work. I began looking into his story when you sold those paintings back in April.”
“I thought it was a good time, since we’d just published a retrospective of his work. I don’t want him to be forgotten, so I’m very grateful you might be writing a book about him.”
“Yes, I’m pretty sure I will; I’ve been researching his life and work for the past few months now.”
“Oh, wonderful!” she reached into her purse and pulled out a card with the Foundation’s information on it. “As you develop the book, you can leave a message for me at this number if you need to consult me on anything.”
“You must have loved him very much.”
“I still do, Mr. Foley. And I feel as though I have a lot to atone for.”
“Forgive me, but…do you feel guilt over his…artistic decline after your…estrangement?”
A very strange, beautiful, sad smile crossed her face. “That’s a very diplomatic way to put it, thank you. When he first left me I was of course hurt, shocked and angry, but eventually I came to realize that I had broken him. The same way I broke Daniel.” Though the tears were streaming down her cheeks, her voice had only a mild quaver until she got to the last few words.
“I’m so very sorry,” he said with absolute sincerity. “I had no idea; I thought…”
“That I had left him?” she said with a strained voice, dabbing her tears with a handkerchief. “Everyone did, and we both let them think so. Two foolish people trying to save face.”
“But why? I mean…nobody saw any trouble between you.”
“Because he was wiser and stronger than Daniel, and was able to do for himself what I had to do for Daniel. Unfortunately, he didn’t do it soon enough.” She dissolved into sobs.
Bert touched her hand in what he hoped she would see as an attempt to comfort her. “It’s not your fault; you couldn’t have known what was happening in his head.”
“Of course I could!” she whispered angrily, but Bert understood the anger was not directed at him. “Didn’t I see it happen twice before? I knew very well what effect I have on artistic men, yet I just kept on getting involved with them for my own selfish reasons, because they adored me so! I was their inspiration, their Muse. But opium inspired a lot of artists, too.”
He gave her time to collect herself, for which she thanked him with a gentle squeeze of his hand and a sad smile. And then, “I’m sorry, but twice before? Who beside Dan Prosser?”
“Didn’t Felicia tell you I was trying to move on from being an artist’s model when we first met?”
“Ah.”
“Well, it’s not going to happen again; that’s why I’m a bit of a recluse these days.”
“But don’t you get lonely?”
“Well, I’m not completely alone; I have woman friends. Just none with artistic temperament; there was a musician I broke it off with in 1970 when I could see she was going in the same direction as the men.”
“Why artists, do you think?”
“I honestly don’t know. I hope you don’t see me as conceited when I say that I know I’m beautiful-”
“Truth is not vanity.”
She smiled again. “You’re very kind, thank you. But artists seem to see…I don’t know, something more. Something that other people can’t see. Something that builds slowly over time, obsessing and eventually possessing them. Something simultaneously fascinating and horrifying. As if there were some aura only they could see. Both Daniel and Richard used to tease me about my wings, implying I was an angel you see. Richard even painted me as an angel or a siren for more than one project. But toward the end both of them started to act as though that was literal, as though there were real parts of me that only they could see. Richard left as soon as that started, but Daniel, well, he couldn’t walk away. So I had to.”
“Did either of them ever try to explain what they thought they saw?”
“Just what I’ve told you. After I came back East with Richard, Daniel once wrote me a letter that said something like, ‘No earthly words are sufficient to describe your unearthly presence’.” She started crying again.
Bert considered for a second asking her if she really didn’t know what it was about her that had such a powerful effect on perceptive souls, but he realized that would’ve been cruel; it was obvious that the truth about her nature was as much a mystery to her as to anyone else. He resolved to shift the conversation to Quincy’s life and work, and did not revisit the subject of Sophia’s life after their separation except to ask the name of the female musician she’d been involved with. By the end of the evening she seemed much more comfortable, and they parted with her enthusiastic support for the project. And all that night, Bert’s dreams were haunted by her piercing eyes.
The next day, he went to a used-record store not all that far from his apartment, and with the help of the owner located Marcia Greene’s work. There was only one album, released early in 1971; the owner said there was another one from ’69, but this was the one she was best known for. Bert looked at the lyrics, printed on the record sleeve; the very first song was called “Haunted” and contained phrases like “invisible wings” and “bottomless eyes”. He took it home, cleaned it well, and put it on the turntable, then lay back on the sofa and let the beautiful, eerie melody wash over him, feeling himself sinking helplessly into what seemed like a distant echo of the music of the spheres, turning and grinding against one another like immense wheels.